(no subject)
DW 05-13, The Big Bang... this icon has never been more appropriate.
Just to warn: this is my longest picspam/review yet. For a while there it pretty much devolved into *quotes scene* *screencaps scene* *wasn't that an amazing scene? :D* *rinse and repeat for next scene*.~ The episode merited it -- as the last episode of Eleven's first season, and a very cool episode in its own right. Part of it was typed up as I watched, and some came later as I added the screencaps, which I kept having to go back and take more of.
I all but fell off my chair when the screen said "1894 years later". Oh no, I thought, he actually did it, Moff left the Doctor locked in the Pandorica for two thousand years; I didn't expect him to actually do that, but of course he did, he's Moff, he could do anything and make it stick, and usually does; AUGH FLAIL ETC.... it was scary.
Then a LITTLE AMELIA SCENE.<3 The whole thing about the crack in her wall is repeated, but this time there's no fish custard. D: And there are no stars. At all. And as far as the adults in her life are concerned, there have never been any stars... ever. Amelia doesn't have much luck with the adults in her life. >/
*lawls at the "star cults"* So that's Amy's Aunt Sharon... she doesn't look like the kind of woman who'd leave her niece alone in the garden all night. Hmm, I mused, maybe Amelia wasn't a neglected child after all, just very, very misunderstood.
Stranger! At the door! In a fez! Is it the Doctor? But he's locked in the Pandorica! The suspense!
Leaving a pamphlet about the Pandorica, with "Come along, Pond" written in red pen?? That REALLY sounds like the Doctor. And didn't he say a red pen in The Lodger... that must be his paradox pen? So did he get out of the Pandorica? Or is this something else? THE SUSPENSE!!
Which leads to LITTLE AMELIA HAULING AUNT SHARON TO THE MUSEUM.<33333
Petrified Daleks, and Amy's drinking soda. XD
And a hand, WHICH LOOKED FAMILIAR, snatched it away and left another note: "Stick around, Pond". Yeah, definitely sounds like the Doctor. But he's still stuck in the etc.
(Poor kid, hiding with the penguins all day. Intrepid as she is, the wear and tear on Aunt Sharon must be enormous.)
And her touch opens the Pandorica. I groaned at that. That plot device was okay in Dalek, but this wasn't the time to go all "Amelia is speshul, the alien box has spent all this time waiting for her". And I sit back and muse okay, fine, so she's letting the Doctor out, this must have been his plan somehow, I hope he'll still be sane after eighteen hundred years, and.....
"Okay, kid, this is where it gets complicated."
ROLL CREDITS. And color me completely taken by surprise. :D
Meanwhile, 1894 years ago.....
"The Doctor said the universe was huge and ridiculous and sometimes there were miracles.
I could do with a ridiculous miracle about now."
OH RORY. ;;
And on cue, the miracle appears. In a fez. With a mop. AHAHAHAHA.
*basically cheers for the next entire scene*
"History has collapsed. Whole races have been deleted from existence." *getting sick of the word "delete"*
..and then he has to find out Amy's dead. Ow. It seemed that this tragedy snapped him right back into Tenth Doctor "individuals don't matter" mode....
..OR DID IT. *basically cheers at the rest of that scene too*
"WELCOME BACK, RORY WILLIAMS!"
Check it out, the Doctor has hair. :D
How to save Amy? Put her in the Pandorica, which won't let anything die, and leave a telepathic message (by mindmeld this time, not headbutt of ultimate knowledge~) for when she wakes up. Then it's time for the Doctor to go back to the future, where future!Amy's healthy bio-pattern will wake her up, but Rory won't come with him.
"That box needs a guard. I destroyed the last one... Would she be safer if I stay? Look me in the eye and tell me she wouldn't be safer."
"Rory...."
"Look me in the eye!"
".....Yes. Obviously."
"Then how could I leave her?"
"Why do you have to be so... human?"
"Because right now I'm not."
OH RORY. ;;
(Brief digression into gender politics: if it had been Plastic Amy settling down to quietly guard Pandorica Rory for two thousand years, would we call it heroically sacrificial love or pathetically needy inability to exist without her man? Okay, end of brief digression. Just been thinking a lot about those sorts of assumed standards and am not quite ready to join the fray, but the thing needs a mention, although I don't really want to discuss it here.)
Meanwhile, in the future, the museum tells Amy that "the Centurion" guarded the Pandorica for ages before apparently being destroyed in the London Blitz. And I thought, oh man, does Rory have to have another tragic death? At least he was brought back for a little while, and Plastic Rory was really pretty brilliant, and -- oh, hi, Doctor-from-the-past, I see you grabbing that fez off the museum diorama -- and guarding Amy is the way he'd have wanted to go, and uh oh, there's a Dalek, but--
*CHEERS AGAIN. FOREVER.* Hallo, Auton Rory!
And get a load of this, Nestine technology pwns Daleks! Woot!
(Gotta mention the Doctor grabbing both Amy and Amelia's hands and yelling "Come on, Ponds!" as he hauled them away from the Dalek. HEEEE.)
Doctor: "So. Two thousand years; how did you do?"
Rory: "Kept out of trouble."
Doctor: "How?
Rory: "Unsuccessfully."
And off the Doctor goes, with his mop and fez, to tell Rory how to get himself out of the Pandorica, to leave the sonic screwdriver, to hop over to Amelia's and put the museum note in her mail slot, etc. Snap me in, snap me out. The time travel in this episode. ITISSOAWESOME -- until a second Eleventh Doctor materializes, one from twelve minutes in the future -- dying. And as he slumps to the ground, little Amelia disappears. NOOOO!
Twelve minutes to live, says the Doctor. The universe is collapsing. And the first thing he needs to find... is an exploding TARDIS.
Which, apparently, in a universe without stars, is standing in for the Sun.
(OK, you know what this reminds me of? That bit in The Search for Spock when the Enterprise plunges to her fiery doom. D:)
And guess who's still in the TARDIS, caught in a time loop for almost two thousand years? Wow, I'd completely forgotten about River. And that was not because of any deficiency in River; the pace of the story, the beautiful use of there-and-back-again time travel, and the writing for the other characters had entirely carried me away.
Doctor: "Hi, honey, I'm home."
River: "And what sort of time d'you call this?"
Me: *kicks Moff* XDDDDDDDDD
Might I just mention that River is made of win. Case in point:
River: "Right, I have questions, but number one is this: what in the name of sanity have you got on your head?"
Doctor: "It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool."
Amy: *snatches fez, throws it off the roof*
River: *oh hay target practice!*
Me: *KEELS OVER. OH SHOW.*
And then: DALEK.
I'm starting to think they're much, much scarier one at a time like this.
Everybody back inside; exposition time. Everyone seems to be content to let the Doctor think. River argues with him, because she can.~ Big Bang II, the Doctor says. The light from the Pandorica needs to reach every part of the universe. And then the Dalek shoots him, and he falls down and disappears -- twelve minutes into the past, Amy says. Where he died.
..oh, River....
"Records indicate you will show mer-cy... you are an as-so-ci-ate of the Doc-tor..."
"I'm River Song. Check your records again."
Is it over-the-top to make a Dalek beg for mercy before shooting it? Well, it's in contravention of the Evil Overlord List. If the Dalek had just regenerated a tiny bit quicker, it might have been a problem. But it had just shot the Doctor.
Downstairs, River is the only one not surprised that the twelve-minutes-later Doctor isn't still dead. "Rule one: the Doctor lies." FINALLY SOMEONE NOTICED. And it turns out that what the Doctor needed time to do was to get into the Pandorica again, where, though nearly dead from being shot by a Dalek (possibly it still wasn't at full power?), he'd managed to rig it to fly into the heart of the exploding TARDIS where the particles it saved from the universe-that-was will reset everything that had happened.
"It's so brilliant it might even work."
The catch? In solving the paradox and closing the cracks in space and time, the Doctor will be trapped on the wrong side. Once everything snaps back to normal, he'll never have existed. At all.
"Are you all right?"
"Are you?"
"..No."
"Shut up then."
It's Amy he wants to talk to, in what might be the last moments he's ever lived. River, in another "OH RIVER" moment, understands: he doesn't really know her yet; "now he never will." "Oh [character]" moments: the episode practically consists of them.
Doctor: "I lied."
Amy: "It's not important."
Doctor: "It's the most important thing left in the universe."
Amy Pond, says the Doctor, wasn't just welcomed aboard because he was lonely, the way he told her: it was because she's an anomaly. The crack in her wall had eaten her parents, had eaten her relatives, had been eating away at her life until she was seven; little, impossible Amelia, with the universe pouring into her head -- "how could I resist?"
But the universe is being reborn. Amy remembered; her memories brought Rory back. If she remembers hard enough, she can bring her parents back too.
"Amy Pond... crying over me, eh... guess what...?"
"What?"
"..Gotcha."
DEAR MOFF, PLEASE WRITE EVERYTHING FROM NOW ON. *CHOKES UP*
And then the Doctor rides the Pandorica into the heart of the universe.
Everyone who said the Doctor-with-a-coat-who-told-Amy-to-remember in Flesh and Stone was an anomaly? You were right. His life's flashing before his eyes backwards; he's a ghost that Amy can't see, but can sort of mostly hear.
"..That was last week, we were going to Space Florida...."
He's unraveling away into nothing and can do nothing to stop it. And that's when that one scene happens that's straight out of a fic I wrote. I AM A VERY HAPPY FAN RIGHT NOW. JUST THOUGHT YOU ALL SHOULD KNOW THAT.
(By the way, in the last series of flashbacks before the Doctor appears in Amelia's house, the very last blurry scene seems to be a woman with red fingernails shooting a tiny gun. I'm completely blanking on which episode that image comes from. Help?)
I'm not transcribing the long, gorgeous soliloquy the Doctor spun for Amy as she slept. eve11, among others, has the complete quote in her review.
"Live well; love Rory. Bye-bye, Pond."
And just as he promised, when she wakes, she has a family again.
AMY'S MUM. AMY'S TINY LITTLE DAD. (Whose name is Augustus.) THEY'RE NICE. Alskdgsld what a change from the RTD days where nice translated into annoying and petty. (Also does Amy always wear a watch when she sleeps? Tsk.~
You know what's awesome about Amy's wedding? All that time, she's trying to remember the Doctor. All the time, we know that she's going to, and somehow he's going to be brought back, because that's the way the universe should go and that's the way the show works and etc. But that doesn't diminish the wedding into something stupid and petty and human that should be transcended and shoved aside because the Doctor isn't involved....
..despite what she does when she actually does remember. That bit, not least telling her brand-new tiny little dad to shut up and her mum starting to talk about psychiatrists instead of humoring her oddball daughter on her wedding day, did strike me as the weakest part of the episode -- this sort of "clap your hands if you believe in Time Lords" stuff is better left back in the RTD era. And I have a major "people getting frowned on by family and friends for daring to parade their eccentricities in public" squick. And where the Pandorica was scientific, at least in a sci-fi way, Amy remembering the Doctor into existence is pure fantasy which, while not internally inconsistent, felt like a letdown after the previous tight plotting. And why did Amy have to remember if River had Significant Gazes and the blue book (even a blank one) to give away. And you know who should have also remembered, because he was just as involved for about 1890 years longer than Amy? Rory, whom I felt for so much when he had no clue why Amy was crying. And speaking of which, Amy is really terrible to Rory, and can she please be a little nicer, it won't take away her Amy-ness?
But for the rest of the episode, I will gladly handwave all that. Besides, it was redeemed by Gillian's roar: "Raggedy man, I remember you, and you are late for my wedding!"
The TARDIS materializes right in front of everyone. And the Doctor has a tux. "Hallo, I'm Amy's imaginary friend, but I came anyway!" And he's a terrible dancer. AND he stays for the whole wedding, and dances with the kids. And Amy and Rory remember everything. Thank you, Moff, that's exactly what should happen at any companion wedding.<3
(Afterwards River and the Doctor have another exchange of cryptic crypticness, complete with lowered voices and Significant Looks:
Doctor: "Are you married?"
River: "Are you asking?"
Doctor: "Yes."
River: "Yes."
Doctor: "No, hang on, did you think I was asking you to marry me or, or, or asking you if you were married?"
River: "Yes."
Doctor: "No, but was that 'yes' or 'yes'?"
River: "Yes.~")
"River, who are you?"
"You're going to find out very soon now... and I'm sorry, but that's when everything changes."
But before it changes, Amy and Rory run away with the Doctor, and we may get to see them fighting an escaped Egyptian goddess on the Orient Express IN SPACE. And I really hope that by "Your Majesty", the Doctor meant Liz Ten.~
Not gonna go into all the other very important stuff right now, like epic next-season theories or threads that could have been taken further or amazing art and fic and meta and other creative stuff that's come out recently, because this entry took days to make as it is and all that can best come during the long break between seasons; but: Moff, Smiff, Gillian, and, yeah, [spoiler characters]: thanks for bringing my show home.<3
Just to warn: this is my longest picspam/review yet. For a while there it pretty much devolved into *quotes scene* *screencaps scene* *wasn't that an amazing scene? :D* *rinse and repeat for next scene*.~ The episode merited it -- as the last episode of Eleven's first season, and a very cool episode in its own right. Part of it was typed up as I watched, and some came later as I added the screencaps, which I kept having to go back and take more of.
I all but fell off my chair when the screen said "1894 years later". Oh no, I thought, he actually did it, Moff left the Doctor locked in the Pandorica for two thousand years; I didn't expect him to actually do that, but of course he did, he's Moff, he could do anything and make it stick, and usually does; AUGH FLAIL ETC.... it was scary.
Then a LITTLE AMELIA SCENE.<3 The whole thing about the crack in her wall is repeated, but this time there's no fish custard. D: And there are no stars. At all. And as far as the adults in her life are concerned, there have never been any stars... ever. Amelia doesn't have much luck with the adults in her life. >/
*lawls at the "star cults"* So that's Amy's Aunt Sharon... she doesn't look like the kind of woman who'd leave her niece alone in the garden all night. Hmm, I mused, maybe Amelia wasn't a neglected child after all, just very, very misunderstood.
Stranger! At the door! In a fez! Is it the Doctor? But he's locked in the Pandorica! The suspense!
Leaving a pamphlet about the Pandorica, with "Come along, Pond" written in red pen?? That REALLY sounds like the Doctor. And didn't he say a red pen in The Lodger... that must be his paradox pen? So did he get out of the Pandorica? Or is this something else? THE SUSPENSE!!
Which leads to LITTLE AMELIA HAULING AUNT SHARON TO THE MUSEUM.<33333
Petrified Daleks, and Amy's drinking soda. XD
And a hand, WHICH LOOKED FAMILIAR, snatched it away and left another note: "Stick around, Pond". Yeah, definitely sounds like the Doctor. But he's still stuck in the etc.
(Poor kid, hiding with the penguins all day. Intrepid as she is, the wear and tear on Aunt Sharon must be enormous.)
And her touch opens the Pandorica. I groaned at that. That plot device was okay in Dalek, but this wasn't the time to go all "Amelia is speshul, the alien box has spent all this time waiting for her". And I sit back and muse okay, fine, so she's letting the Doctor out, this must have been his plan somehow, I hope he'll still be sane after eighteen hundred years, and.....
"Okay, kid, this is where it gets complicated."
ROLL CREDITS. And color me completely taken by surprise. :D
Meanwhile, 1894 years ago.....
"The Doctor said the universe was huge and ridiculous and sometimes there were miracles.
I could do with a ridiculous miracle about now."
OH RORY. ;;
And on cue, the miracle appears. In a fez. With a mop. AHAHAHAHA.
*basically cheers for the next entire scene*
"History has collapsed. Whole races have been deleted from existence." *getting sick of the word "delete"*
..and then he has to find out Amy's dead. Ow. It seemed that this tragedy snapped him right back into Tenth Doctor "individuals don't matter" mode....
..OR DID IT. *basically cheers at the rest of that scene too*
"WELCOME BACK, RORY WILLIAMS!"
Check it out, the Doctor has hair. :D
How to save Amy? Put her in the Pandorica, which won't let anything die, and leave a telepathic message (by mindmeld this time, not headbutt of ultimate knowledge~) for when she wakes up. Then it's time for the Doctor to go back to the future, where future!Amy's healthy bio-pattern will wake her up, but Rory won't come with him.
"That box needs a guard. I destroyed the last one... Would she be safer if I stay? Look me in the eye and tell me she wouldn't be safer."
"Rory...."
"Look me in the eye!"
".....Yes. Obviously."
"Then how could I leave her?"
"Why do you have to be so... human?"
"Because right now I'm not."
OH RORY. ;;
(Brief digression into gender politics: if it had been Plastic Amy settling down to quietly guard Pandorica Rory for two thousand years, would we call it heroically sacrificial love or pathetically needy inability to exist without her man? Okay, end of brief digression. Just been thinking a lot about those sorts of assumed standards and am not quite ready to join the fray, but the thing needs a mention, although I don't really want to discuss it here.)
Meanwhile, in the future, the museum tells Amy that "the Centurion" guarded the Pandorica for ages before apparently being destroyed in the London Blitz. And I thought, oh man, does Rory have to have another tragic death? At least he was brought back for a little while, and Plastic Rory was really pretty brilliant, and -- oh, hi, Doctor-from-the-past, I see you grabbing that fez off the museum diorama -- and guarding Amy is the way he'd have wanted to go, and uh oh, there's a Dalek, but--
*CHEERS AGAIN. FOREVER.* Hallo, Auton Rory!
And get a load of this, Nestine technology pwns Daleks! Woot!
(Gotta mention the Doctor grabbing both Amy and Amelia's hands and yelling "Come on, Ponds!" as he hauled them away from the Dalek. HEEEE.)
Doctor: "So. Two thousand years; how did you do?"
Rory: "Kept out of trouble."
Doctor: "How?
Rory: "Unsuccessfully."
And off the Doctor goes, with his mop and fez, to tell Rory how to get himself out of the Pandorica, to leave the sonic screwdriver, to hop over to Amelia's and put the museum note in her mail slot, etc. Snap me in, snap me out. The time travel in this episode. ITISSOAWESOME -- until a second Eleventh Doctor materializes, one from twelve minutes in the future -- dying. And as he slumps to the ground, little Amelia disappears. NOOOO!
Twelve minutes to live, says the Doctor. The universe is collapsing. And the first thing he needs to find... is an exploding TARDIS.
Which, apparently, in a universe without stars, is standing in for the Sun.
(OK, you know what this reminds me of? That bit in The Search for Spock when the Enterprise plunges to her fiery doom. D:)
And guess who's still in the TARDIS, caught in a time loop for almost two thousand years? Wow, I'd completely forgotten about River. And that was not because of any deficiency in River; the pace of the story, the beautiful use of there-and-back-again time travel, and the writing for the other characters had entirely carried me away.
Doctor: "Hi, honey, I'm home."
River: "And what sort of time d'you call this?"
Me: *kicks Moff* XDDDDDDDDD
Might I just mention that River is made of win. Case in point:
River: "Right, I have questions, but number one is this: what in the name of sanity have you got on your head?"
Doctor: "It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool."
Amy: *snatches fez, throws it off the roof*
River: *oh hay target practice!*
Me: *KEELS OVER. OH SHOW.*
And then: DALEK.
I'm starting to think they're much, much scarier one at a time like this.
Everybody back inside; exposition time. Everyone seems to be content to let the Doctor think. River argues with him, because she can.~ Big Bang II, the Doctor says. The light from the Pandorica needs to reach every part of the universe. And then the Dalek shoots him, and he falls down and disappears -- twelve minutes into the past, Amy says. Where he died.
..oh, River....
"Records indicate you will show mer-cy... you are an as-so-ci-ate of the Doc-tor..."
"I'm River Song. Check your records again."
Is it over-the-top to make a Dalek beg for mercy before shooting it? Well, it's in contravention of the Evil Overlord List. If the Dalek had just regenerated a tiny bit quicker, it might have been a problem. But it had just shot the Doctor.
Downstairs, River is the only one not surprised that the twelve-minutes-later Doctor isn't still dead. "Rule one: the Doctor lies." FINALLY SOMEONE NOTICED. And it turns out that what the Doctor needed time to do was to get into the Pandorica again, where, though nearly dead from being shot by a Dalek (possibly it still wasn't at full power?), he'd managed to rig it to fly into the heart of the exploding TARDIS where the particles it saved from the universe-that-was will reset everything that had happened.
"It's so brilliant it might even work."
The catch? In solving the paradox and closing the cracks in space and time, the Doctor will be trapped on the wrong side. Once everything snaps back to normal, he'll never have existed. At all.
"Are you all right?"
"Are you?"
"..No."
"Shut up then."
It's Amy he wants to talk to, in what might be the last moments he's ever lived. River, in another "OH RIVER" moment, understands: he doesn't really know her yet; "now he never will." "Oh [character]" moments: the episode practically consists of them.
Doctor: "I lied."
Amy: "It's not important."
Doctor: "It's the most important thing left in the universe."
Amy Pond, says the Doctor, wasn't just welcomed aboard because he was lonely, the way he told her: it was because she's an anomaly. The crack in her wall had eaten her parents, had eaten her relatives, had been eating away at her life until she was seven; little, impossible Amelia, with the universe pouring into her head -- "how could I resist?"
But the universe is being reborn. Amy remembered; her memories brought Rory back. If she remembers hard enough, she can bring her parents back too.
"Amy Pond... crying over me, eh... guess what...?"
"What?"
"..Gotcha."
DEAR MOFF, PLEASE WRITE EVERYTHING FROM NOW ON. *CHOKES UP*
And then the Doctor rides the Pandorica into the heart of the universe.
Everyone who said the Doctor-with-a-coat-who-told-Amy-to-remember in Flesh and Stone was an anomaly? You were right. His life's flashing before his eyes backwards; he's a ghost that Amy can't see, but can sort of mostly hear.
"..That was last week, we were going to Space Florida...."
He's unraveling away into nothing and can do nothing to stop it. And that's when that one scene happens that's straight out of a fic I wrote. I AM A VERY HAPPY FAN RIGHT NOW. JUST THOUGHT YOU ALL SHOULD KNOW THAT.
(By the way, in the last series of flashbacks before the Doctor appears in Amelia's house, the very last blurry scene seems to be a woman with red fingernails shooting a tiny gun. I'm completely blanking on which episode that image comes from. Help?)
I'm not transcribing the long, gorgeous soliloquy the Doctor spun for Amy as she slept. eve11, among others, has the complete quote in her review.
"Live well; love Rory. Bye-bye, Pond."
And just as he promised, when she wakes, she has a family again.
AMY'S MUM. AMY'S TINY LITTLE DAD. (Whose name is Augustus.) THEY'RE NICE. Alskdgsld what a change from the RTD days where nice translated into annoying and petty. (Also does Amy always wear a watch when she sleeps? Tsk.~
You know what's awesome about Amy's wedding? All that time, she's trying to remember the Doctor. All the time, we know that she's going to, and somehow he's going to be brought back, because that's the way the universe should go and that's the way the show works and etc. But that doesn't diminish the wedding into something stupid and petty and human that should be transcended and shoved aside because the Doctor isn't involved....
..despite what she does when she actually does remember. That bit, not least telling her brand-new tiny little dad to shut up and her mum starting to talk about psychiatrists instead of humoring her oddball daughter on her wedding day, did strike me as the weakest part of the episode -- this sort of "clap your hands if you believe in Time Lords" stuff is better left back in the RTD era. And I have a major "people getting frowned on by family and friends for daring to parade their eccentricities in public" squick. And where the Pandorica was scientific, at least in a sci-fi way, Amy remembering the Doctor into existence is pure fantasy which, while not internally inconsistent, felt like a letdown after the previous tight plotting. And why did Amy have to remember if River had Significant Gazes and the blue book (even a blank one) to give away. And you know who should have also remembered, because he was just as involved for about 1890 years longer than Amy? Rory, whom I felt for so much when he had no clue why Amy was crying. And speaking of which, Amy is really terrible to Rory, and can she please be a little nicer, it won't take away her Amy-ness?
But for the rest of the episode, I will gladly handwave all that. Besides, it was redeemed by Gillian's roar: "Raggedy man, I remember you, and you are late for my wedding!"
The TARDIS materializes right in front of everyone. And the Doctor has a tux. "Hallo, I'm Amy's imaginary friend, but I came anyway!" And he's a terrible dancer. AND he stays for the whole wedding, and dances with the kids. And Amy and Rory remember everything. Thank you, Moff, that's exactly what should happen at any companion wedding.<3
(Afterwards River and the Doctor have another exchange of cryptic crypticness, complete with lowered voices and Significant Looks:
Doctor: "Are you married?"
River: "Are you asking?"
Doctor: "Yes."
River: "Yes."
Doctor: "No, hang on, did you think I was asking you to marry me or, or, or asking you if you were married?"
River: "Yes."
Doctor: "No, but was that 'yes' or 'yes'?"
River: "Yes.~")
"River, who are you?"
"You're going to find out very soon now... and I'm sorry, but that's when everything changes."
But before it changes, Amy and Rory run away with the Doctor, and we may get to see them fighting an escaped Egyptian goddess on the Orient Express IN SPACE. And I really hope that by "Your Majesty", the Doctor meant Liz Ten.~
Not gonna go into all the other very important stuff right now, like epic next-season theories or threads that could have been taken further or amazing art and fic and meta and other creative stuff that's come out recently, because this entry took days to make as it is and all that can best come during the long break between seasons; but: Moff, Smiff, Gillian, and, yeah, [spoiler characters]: thanks for bringing my show home.<3